Letters

Not in tango

SIR – Argentina's current determination to pay only what it wants to pay, except to those creditors whom it deems expedient to pay, is disdainful of the law and disdainful of the people who believed the country's promises to pay (“A victory by default?”, March 5th). Yet you and the IMF take a scornful tone towards creditors, particularly the not-so-small group who may not want to sit still for the shearing. Argentina was lent vast sums over the years. Yet the IMF exhibits no curiosity about where this money went. Why are the IMF and its cohorts always permitted to elbow themselves to the front of the creditor line when things go south? Perhaps they should be repaid only after foreign private lenders have been paid. That would make the IMF much more cautious before it comes barrelling in with its often-kooky prescriptions and huge new loans.

You also criticise Elliott Associates for its Peru investment. But Elliott rejected Peru's debt restructuring because we believed (correctly, it turned out) that Peru didn't tell the truth about its finances, understating its foreign- currency reserves and repurchasing half of its defaulted bank debt at deep discounts. Peru's obstinacy (including its refusal to recognise Elliott as a creditor) forced the case to a court judgment, after years of litigation. During that time, we tried repeatedly to settle with Peru—at far less than full payment. We never jeopardised their restructuring, which was completed years before our judgment.

SIR – It will be the emerging- market economies who foot the bill for Argentina's spectacular triumph over its foreign creditors. In the event of a future debt default, domestic political considerations will force the affected country to be as hard-nosed and tight-fisted with its foreign creditors as was Argentina. For example, if Brazil were to default, could President Lula politically agree to settle with external creditors at more than the 35 cents extracted by Argentina? External bondholders will now be more skittish at the first sign of future emerging-market trouble and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt than they were before; foreign creditors will expect to be compensated more adequately for running the risk of a repeat of an Argentine-like situation.

Desmond Lachman

Washington, DC

Race education

SIR – I welcome the seriousness with which you take the catastrophic performance of Afro-Caribbean boys in British schools (“Black marks”, March 12th). However, your argument that the problem is really one of poverty rather than race or gender (as very poor white boys who receive free school meals do slightly worse than very poor black boys) is flawed. Even if we accept the outdated idea that receipt of free school meals is a proxy for poverty, fewer than 10% of children in Britain fall into this category; what your own figures tellingly demonstrate is that better-off Afro-Caribbean boys are twice as likely to fail as their white peers (you also skimp the fact that black girls do nearly twice as well as black boys).

Moreover, the real-life evidence contradicts your conclusion. One South London boy's school has raised the exam performance of its black students from 25.6% to 44.4% in two years with targeted action. And a small charity, the Windsor Fellowship, has put over 500 minority children through exactly the sort of programme to which you so object. In 2004, 100% of its London students achieved five good exam passes compared to an average of 27.3% for all black boys.

Trevor Phillips

Commission for Racial Equality

London

SIR – It is true that race has nothing to do with children failing in school, whether they are black or white. But the old refrain that “the real problem [is] that the school system fails the poor” is wrong and destructive. It creates a cultural climate where failing students refer to the same built-in excuse: if I attend a failing school, then what chance do I have? Instead, we should create a climate where people believe that school is a place that, if you work, you will learn. Community leaders have an obligation to their children to instil the moral obligation to work hard. Making schools the scapegoat is a waste of time and a disservice to our children (I taught in minority schools for 41 years).

Elliot Kotler

Ossining, New York

God's law?

SIR – The debate over separation of church and judiciary is mystifying (“Go down, Moses?”, March 5th). The secular laws that are held sacred and must be protected from religious contamination are the modern heirs to a tradition of jurisprudence that is, in reality, Judeo-Christian in origin. The Ten Commandments, as the essence of that covenant, are thus by far the most fitting decoration of any courthouse in the West. When well-intentioned secularists argue for their removal, they invest the law with a mythic “natural” pedigree that puts them beyond cultural specificity and confuse secular truth with what is, in fact, religious in origin. In this light, secularism and religion are two faces of the same social coin, and our “secular” laws bind them.

Peter Harrington

Peterborough, Cambridgeshire

Regional dynamics

SIR – You argue in your survey on India and China that China has lapped India mainly on account of China's farsighted and bold economic reforms (”The tiger in front”, March 5th). While this may be true, you ignore two external factors. First, South Asia (excluding India) is poorer than India, so India lacks a viable market as well as a source of investment in its neighbourhood. China, in contrast, enjoys large trade and investment flows from its rich East Asian neighbours, such as Japan (the world's second-largest economy) and South Korea. These are in addition to ethnic Chinese investments from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Second, China's permanent seat and veto in the United Nations Security Council is a valuable bargaining chip when it engages places like Sudan and Iran in economic diplomacy. America cannot ignore a veto-wielding China in resolving issues such as Taiwan and North Korea. Witness the favourable trade terms that have often been offered as a carrot by the United States and the European Union to a potentially truculent China.

Avimukt Dar

Delhi

Robotic past

SIR – You dated the inception of the idea of humanoid robots almost three centuries after the fact (“Humanoids on the march”, March 12th). René Descartes wrote of men that could be “hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs”. Written in 1641, the idea of robots existed at least 280 years prior to Karl Capek's play.

Paul Mahler

Denver

SIR – In 1737 a Frenchman, Jacques de Vaucanson, developed an honest-to-goodness flute-playing android; the following year he created a mechanical duck that could flap its wings and eat grain.

JACK BLOCK

San Diego, California

Balkan war crimes

SIR - You say that Serbs view the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague as a "kangaroo court" ("Justice arrives, slowly but steadily", Economist.com, March 9th). In fact, by and large Serbs do not accuse the court of lacking adjudicative safeguards to prove one's innocence. The institutional bias of the tribunal, say I and most of my fellow Serbs, lies with the Office of The Prosecutor [Carla Del Ponte], which until recently was interested mostly in crimes committed by Serbs, leaving high-profile Croatian and Muslim criminals with little fear of accountability.

While the recent indictment of Mr Haradinaj begins to redress that imbalance, the indictment of Generals Delic and Gotovina only mask the simple fact that both Croatian President Tudjman and Bosnian President Izetbegovic were allowed to die of natural causes, without ever worrying about criminal prosecution for their wartime acts. Justice could only have been served if those two had shared a cell with Slobodan Milosevic. Human mortality and the ethnically selective prosecution of Ms Del Ponte and her predecessor have ensured that the tribunal will never be seen as legitimate in Serbia.

Jovan Ivosevic

Los Angeles

Sinn Fein and the IRA

SIR - In your article "Unwelcome St Patrick's Day guests" (Economist.com, March 15th) you refer to the end of the IRA's guerrilla campaign. Since when did the IRA become a guerrilla organisation? Having lived in England as the IRA neatly placed bombs into rubbish bins alongside busy shopping areas I can assure you it was a campaign of terror. Perhaps you were trying not to offend the sensitivities of our American cousins, but the IRA are terrorists, and have been so for a very long time. If that means Edward Kennedy and his like-minded friends and colleagues are deemed to support terrorism, then so be it.

Garry Trigger

Fighting terror

SIR - I am troubled by your insistence on referring to the international fight against terrorism between sarcastic quotation marks ("A misguided strike at the rebels' heart", Economist.com, March 9th). Do you deny that military operations are ongoing against terrorist forces across the globe? As long as your despicable use of "war on terror" finds itself in the non-opinion sections of your publication, you ought to be honest and refer to your news "analysis" as "propaganda for terror-sympathising Eurotrash".